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Japanese con men target savings of elderly victims

Four Japanese men have been arrested over the sale of bank accounts to gangsters for use in a rampant telephone scam often designed to trick the elderly out of their savings, police and news reports said yesterday.

The growing crime saw young men call vulnerable targets pretending to be relatives and saying "It's me" instead of giving a name and asking for a cash transfer to a bank account. A popular ploy in the so-called "It's me" scam was to pretend they had been in a traffic accident.

The police said the four had been arrested for "swindling a bank of bank books and cards" by opening accounts at two branches of a Tokyo bank last September but planning to sell them on.

The four men are believed to have sold at least 1,400 accounts, Jiji Press news agency and Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) public television network said.

It was the first major crackdown on organized illegal trade in bank accounts, they said.

One of the arrested men, Tadaaki Ogimura, a 41-year-old head of a phone-answering company in Tokyo, reportedly hired collaborators by placing advertisements on "part-time jobs" in tabloids and on Internet Web sites, NHK said. NHK quoted Ogimura as saying "there was strong demand from `it's me' swindlers and illegal loan sharks."
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